Lusitania Medal with box, World War I The First Obverse: The Lusitania slipping beneath the waves stern first (opposite to what really happened) and with obvious war contraband on her deck: cannon, war planes, armaments, with the admonishment above "No Contraband Goods!" Below, in exergue, the German equivalent of, "The liner Lusitania sunk by a German submarine May 5, 1915." This is Goetz' first obverse which bore the incorrect date of 5 MAI (the German spelling), an error he later attributed to an flawed newspaper account. And that error is what made this such a controversial piece. The Reverse: A skeleton (representing death) sells passage at the Cunard Line ticket office. Along the top of the medal are the German words for "Business Above All" mocking the Cunard Line for willingly placing passenger's lives at stake. At left is a man reading a paper on which are the German words for "U-Boat danger", while behind him is the figure of the German ambassador, Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff, raising a wagging finger as a reminder that the Germans had placed a warning advertisement in the same newspaper as the Cunard Lines sailing schedule. The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner and briefly the world's largest passenger ship until the completion of her running mate Mauretania. She was launched by the Cunard Line in 1906, at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade. On 7 May 1915, she was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, causing the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew. When RMS Lusitania left New York for Liverpool on what would be her final voyage on 1 May 1915, submarine warfare was intensifying in the Atlantic. Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom a war zone, and the German embassy in the United States had placed a newspaper advertisement warning people of the dangers of sailing on Lusitania. On the afternoon of 7 May, Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, 18 km off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared "zone of war". A second internal explosion sent her to the bottom in 18 minutes. In firing on a non-military ship without warning, the Germans had breached the international laws known as the Cruiser Rules. Although the Germans had reasons for treating Lusitania as a naval vessel, including the facts that the ship was carrying war munitions and the British had been breaching the Cruiser Rules, the sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States, as 128 American citizens were among the dead. The ship's sinking provided Britain with a propaganda opportunity, which helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany and strongly influenced America's eventual declaration of war two years later, in 1917.